The Jackal's Share (19 page)

After five minutes walking Qazai and Senechal passed through a pointed arch into a broad square that jostled with life. Bicycles and cars zipped across it dodging carts and donkeys in their way, and around its sides the shops were beginning to close, taking their goods down and leaving blank walls behind them. The smell of wood and charcoal burning was in the air. Webster watched the two men head for the far corner, hung back for longer than he would have liked and then cautiously followed, now a good thirty yards behind and trying his best to keep them in sight while negotiating the traffic buzzing around him. Just short of the street that led out of the square Senechal stopped and got out his map. Qazai stood beside him and turned a quarter turn, looking over his shoulder in Webster’s direction.

It was the last thing Webster saw that made any sense. A great weight struck him; he was conscious of feeling helplessly light, of skittering across the dusty ground, of coming to a stop with his face in the dirt. He could see a donkey’s hoof up close, the horn gray and cracked, but he couldn’t raise his head to see more. And then he couldn’t see anything at all.

17.

T
HE FIRST THING HE
was conscious of, before the pain and the utter dark, was the smell: an invasive mix of mold and urine and ammonia that sat inside his head and produced a sensation of intense nausea throughout his body. Pain coursed up and down his right side as if unable to find a place to settle. His mouth was dry as dust.

For a long time he lay on his side, the better one, trying to make out some trace of light. A sudden fear took him that he couldn’t see, but after a while he knew that there was a different quality to the dark when his eyes were open: it had space, somehow; it gave a sense of extent. He had no desire to move into it but knew that he couldn’t simply lie where he was and wait for the light to come, so by slow degrees he tried to sit up, pushing himself off the hard surface with his elbow bent under him. Immediately his ribs contracted in pain and a flood of sickness rose up through him. He tried again, prepared now for the worst of it, trying to roll forward to give his arm greater purchase and, with the exertion, finding that each breath caused a new release of pain. His right arm could do nothing.

After a minute’s effort he was half up, supported by his good arm. He moved his legs forward carefully, pleased to find them working, and was wracked afresh as his feet slipped off into the blackness. So he was on a ledge, or a bed, and by working his legs off the edge he managed to swing the rest of his body upright and sat for several moments, hunched, exhausted, taking shallow breaths of the hot, bad air.

He patted his pockets, looking for his phone, and found that he was still wearing the robe. In the heat he longed to take it off but knew he could not. The phone had gone, but there was something else in there, and by leaning backward and straining, his stomach muscles in agony, he managed to force his hand through the opening in the djellaba and into the unobliging pocket of his jeans, where it finally discovered, next to a crushed pack of cigarettes, the smooth plastic casing of the cheap lighter he had bought the night before.

Lit up, the room was less encouraging than the pitiless dark. It was a cell, perhaps eight feet by eight feet, whose pitted gray walls, sweating in the heat, were broken only by a rusted metal door. But for the thin concrete slab he was sitting on, and another across from him that left a three-foot channel in between, the space was unbroken, and there was something pure about its single-minded commitment to its grim purpose. Nothing was scratched on the walls, and Webster wondered whether he could possibly be the first person to be brought here. Warily he checked his head and side for blood, but found nothing more than a long, deepish graze that ran from his forehead across his temple.

The wheel of the lighter had grown too hot to hold. Bending down in the dark, with effort, he untied his shoe and took it off before collecting himself and standing up in a single agonizing motion, his hand against the wall behind him for support. He shuffled forward and with the shoe in his left hand began to beat the iron door with its heel, hard and loud, with a slow, steady rhythm. He noticed that no light at all showed around the door frame.

The dull banging pounded in his head and made thinking difficult, but he tried to relax and imagine what could have happened to him. He had been hit by a car, or by a truck. That he knew, and he could remember knowing it the moment he landed on the ground. Then why wasn’t he in hospital? People had seen that he was injured and would have called an ambulance, surely? He could hear the shouting, see them clustering around him, see someone pull a cell phone out and make the call.

Someone had arranged the accident, or someone had taken advantage of it, that much was certain. Call him Chiba. He needed a name. Perhaps Chiba’s men had seen him following Qazai; perhaps they had seen him waiting in his djellaba for their meeting to finish. However it had happened, they had seen him, he was sure; sure, too, that soon he was about to meet the man he had been so blindly pursuing.

The clanging slowed a little as his arm began to tire, and he wondered how long he had been keeping it up. Ten minutes? Two? He clicked the lighter on again and looked at his watch, thankfully unbroken, which showed that it was half past ten, almost four hours since Qazai and Senechal had passed him in the passage. He continued for a minute or two, but his good arm now hurt almost as much as the rest of him, and he reluctantly conceded that he had to stop. Faint from standing, having had no water for several hours and no food for longer, he leaned his head against the door and finally gave in to the rushing stream of fear that this mindless activity, his one source of hope, had kept in check. How, he asked himself, had it come to this? Slowly, staggering a little and feeling profoundly sick, he dragged his feet over to the ledge where he had started, lay down, and fell at length into a shifting, churning half-sleep.

•   •   •

A
S HE CAME IN
and out of consciousness he grasped at a series of jagged, fractured dreams. Children, not his own, played in unknown landscapes where the heat of the sun and its blinding light were so strong that they filled each scene with silent menace.

The grating of a key turning in the door brought him up from sleep, and a second later a flash of bluish white light woke him fully. A black figure was in the doorway, saying something he didn’t understand. All he could do was blink at the brightness.

“Up,” said the figure. “Now.”

Webster pushed himself up on his elbow, but before he could sit he had been grabbed by his other arm and pulled erect. He could smell stale tobacco and old meat on the man’s breath, and on the edges of his silhouette there was the fuzzy outline of a beard.

“Come.”

The man’s hand took strong hold of his upper arm and led him out of the cell, down a corridor whose bare cement walls were lit by a single fluorescent tube. There were no details, no features that might suggest the building’s function. Nor was there any noise, but for their footsteps, harsh on the concrete floor. They passed three other doors—wooden, he noticed, with no locks—on the same side as the cell, before the man turned down a second corridor, knocked firmly at a door on the right and without waiting for a reply went in.

This room was whitewashed, unbearably bright under another single strip light, and smelled of heat and mildew. As Webster entered, hobbling and squinting, he could make out one man sitting behind a desk and another standing against the wall opposite the door, both wearing suits—one black, one gray—and white shirts with no tie. They were only superficially alike. One was lanky, all thin limbs improbably long, and he sat at the table like a crab trying to fit itself into too small a space. His suit was rumpled and in patches gray with dust, his face elongated and hollow.

The other man was shorter, taut with muscle, the skin on his face tight against the bone and his posture sprung, suggesting great energy barely contained and waiting impatiently for release. Black and gray hairs showed at the base of his neck, which was flexed and unyielding, like thick cable, and there was three days’ beard on his face. He held his hands by his sides, tightening them slowly into fists and then releasing them, his knuckles white. Webster’s body registered a fear of him at once, a physical knowledge of his viciousness. A pair of metal-framed sunglasses covered his eyes, and Webster knew from the moment he came into the room that he was the one in charge.

The guard shoved him onto a chair, and with a nod from the lanky man was dismissed. For a minute no one said anything. Against every message sent by the insistent aching in his head and the violent pain in his side Webster tried to breathe regularly, as deeply as he could, and to establish some sense of calm.

“Why are you in Morocco?” The thin man spoke. His accent was heavy but unplaceable, his voice languid, almost quiet, and while waiting for the answer he cocked his head on one side, staring at a point on the desk.

“I’m here on business.”

There was a long pause. The thin man stared at his finger as it made an endless figure-of-eight over the wood. He hadn’t yet looked Webster in the eye.

“What business?”

The best lie was as close as you could make it to the truth. “Research.”

“Of what?”

“A businessman. In Marrakech.”

“Name?”

“My name?”

“His name. You are Webster.”

How did they know it? His passport was at his hotel, carefully hidden. He had no credit cards on him. They had his phone, but his phone was locked. Unless they had found Driss as well. That unpleasant thought had not struck him before.

“I can’t tell you that.”

The thin man’s finger stopped circling. Out of the corner of his eye Webster sensed movement and turned stiffly, too slowly to see the flat of the other man’s hand connect with the side of his head with improbable force. A rush of air broke into his ear with the noise of a thunderclap and he fell from the chair onto the floor.

He lay there for a moment, his cheek pressing into grit, dazed and shocked, the only stubborn thought in his head that he must be close to something devastating to be receiving this sort of treatment.

The man in sunglasses stood over him, his face silhouetted against the bluish fluorescent light.

“Up.”

The word was hoarse, sudden; Webster felt the need to obey it, but could not. He lay still for a moment, processing the shock, before lifting his head off the floor, feeling the muscles in his neck straining with the work. This time he saw the man move. In one swift motion he drew his foot back and with great precision kicked Webster hard in the side, in the soft flesh between hip and ribs, filling his body with a great, vivid pain that seemed to swirl with color and brought nausea surging into his throat.

Webster rolled onto his side, curling up to protect himself, for the first time feeling real fear inside the pain. This man knew what he was doing. He had the discipline of the professional, the economy of effort, the singular focus. He had done this many times before. Shadow fell across Webster and he knew that the man was standing over him, calculating which piece of him to work on next.

But instead he took a step closer, bent down until his mouth was an inch from Webster’s ear, and when he spoke his voice was a harsh, quiet rasp that Webster had to strain to hear through the ringing and the roar.

“Tell me why you are here.”

Webster tried to speak, but had no words. The taste of acid was on his tongue and his mouth was clamped shut. It wouldn’t open; his body was no longer taking commands.

“Up.” The voice was still quiet, but it had power; Webster felt it occupy him. He made a weak effort to sit.

The man said something in his own language, and at his command his colleague came out from behind the desk, put a hand under Webster’s arm and together they pulled him up, dumping him heavily onto the chair, where he sat slumped, conscious only of the pain and his own dead weight.

Again the voice in his ear, fierce but strangely delicate, and so close he could feel its breath. “Tell me who you are.”

With effort he managed to shake his head. There was a pause, during which he sensed the man moving slowly away from him.

This time he was ready for it, almost, and managed through some instinct to bring his hand up to his head as the blow struck, the same as the first, an open palm aimed at his head. It was enough to send him over, but he grabbed the edge of the desk and righted himself, turning back with a defiant look at his attacker.

“The night will be long if you do not help us,” said the thin man.

But the professional had finished talking. He put his arm around Webster’s neck and pulled sharply, sending the chair crashing backward. Webster felt his skull crack on the floor and looked up, stunned, to see the man pulling him upright again. He said something else to his underling, who took Webster, spun him around and held him tightly across his middle, clamping his arms and causing pain to rage through his side. Webster writhed against the grip but his strength had gone, and all he could do was push the man backward and try to unbalance him. They slammed into a wall, but his hold was still firm and Webster for a moment stopped struggling because the pain was too much, and at that moment he saw the smaller man bring his knee up with great force and precision into the middle of his thigh, once, twice and quickly again.

Everything stopped. Every thought, every sense. There was only the pain, sharp and raging, which began in his gut and spread out through his body until there was nothing else.

Webster reeled with the shock. The tall man let go of him and he retched, felt acid rise into his mouth. He hadn’t been prepared. He hadn’t thought it possible that so much pain could come at once. The tall man pushed him, just enough to send him back a pace, and he fell back onto the chair.

His torturer stood still for a moment, staring at Webster through the dark lenses of his glasses, giving him a simple message: if you persist, so will I, and in the end I will destroy you. After several seconds he clenched and released his fists once more, and stepped forward, stooping until their eyes were level.

“Pressure points. In your leg. I do it again, you pass out.”

The pain was everywhere, but it had settled, become constant.

“After, I start with your eyes.”

Webster felt any courage he had quail inside him, and blinked involuntarily.

“Are you Chiba?” he said, his lips numb, trying his best to look the man in the face.

The man stared at him, his gaze steady and black.

“If my friends don’t hear from me twice a day,” said Webster, hearing the words drop clumsily from his mouth as if someone else was saying them, “everything we know about your business with Qazai goes to the press.”

The man looked up and smiled at his friend before turning back to Webster.

“Who is Qazai?”

“You know who he is.”

At that, he took Webster’s jaw in his hand and gripped it hard with strong fingers, holding it for a moment before he spoke. Webster could feel the flesh of his cheek being crushed against his teeth.